My husband runs a small custom furniture business. He makes beautiful things — tables and chairs and cabinets, mostly — and he sells them locally and occasionally ships them. It is a real business, with a real website and real customers who are genuinely delightful people.

Occasionally, however, he gets emails from Craigslist that are clearly scams. You know the type: someone wants to buy something for their son or daughter who is away at college, they will pay by cashier's check, they will send more than the asking price and he should wire the difference to their shipper. Classic advance-fee fraud, dressed up in slightly different clothes each time.

For years he deleted these without responding. Then one day, for reasons he cannot entirely explain, he decided to reply. Not to engage with the scam, but to have a conversation — to see how long he could keep the scammer talking while saying absolutely nothing useful.

The results were magnificent. He told one scammer that the table they wanted was currently being used as a landing pad for his pet falcon, Gerald, and that Gerald had become very attached to it and might need some time to adjust to the change. The scammer, apparently undeterred by Gerald, continued to press for the cashier's check arrangement.

He told another that the chair they wanted had a complicated history involving a minor European royal and a disputed inheritance, and that the legal situation was still being resolved, but he expected it to be cleared up within the next three to five years. The scammer wished him luck with the legal situation and asked again about the cashier's check.

I have read these exchanges many times and they never fail to make me laugh. There is something deeply satisfying about wasting a scammer's time — about turning their predatory patience against them. Gerald the falcon has become something of a household legend. We are thinking of getting a real falcon and naming him Gerald, in honor of his fictional predecessor.